Measuring professional growth in teacher learning groups

摘要: Measuring teachers’ professional growth often includes a mixture of portfolio analyses and classroom observations. This study presents a newly constructed instrument to measure professional growth. This instrument is called the Interview Guide to measure Teachers’ Professional Growth (IGTPG). The instrument builds on a questionnaire that records (the relationship between) constituents of professional growth (ie, personal domain, external domain, domain of practice, and domain of consequence) as depicted by Clarke and Hollingsworth’s Interconnected Model of Professional Growth (IMPG). We used the interview guide to capture the professional growth of six primary school teachers in teacher-learning groups in two different settings. The results of our interview study show that most of the teachers did not experience extensive growth yet, at the time the interviews were administered. This might be due to the fact that these teachers participated in teacher-learning groups that were (still) in exploratory and analytic phases of their educational (design) research projects. An evaluation shows that the instrument has potential value: we could identify elementary constituents of the IMPG and establish growth (if occurred). Additional research is necessary to validate the instrument.(words: 182)